XFER Blog

Businesses face numerous challenges, many of which arise internally. Whether your business is dealing with cybersecurity threats, unhappy customers, or unreliable suppliers, leaders must navigate every threat. Among these, internal issues can often be the most disruptive. In this blog, we'll focus on two critical employee-related challenges that can significantly hinder business operations.

When you run a small business, there is a tendency to dream big. You think of expanding rapidly and finding success instantly. Unfortunately, this is probably not the reality. By keeping your expectations realistic, you can find that you will find consistency. In today’s blog, let’s take a look at how any manager or entrepreneur can keep their expectations realistic. 

When you think about it, the technology we have today is truly awe-inspiring, simply because it enables us to be so much more productive as we exercise our creativity. All one really has to do to prove its value is to compare the quality of life we enjoy now as compared to almost any time in the past.

However, this does not mean that everyone is using technology to its full capacity and, as a result, suffering some consequential effects. Let’s consider some of these effects to reinforce why it pays to embrace the potential uses of technology fully.

Your organization’s technology doesn’t do you any good if it is inaccessible. That’s why having a thoroughly thought-out and carefully implemented plan to proactively keep ahead of technology issues is so important. This month, we want to talk a little bit about technology-related downtime and how to keep it from being a royal pain in your business’ rear.

"Quit." The q-word is often seen as one of the worst four-letter words in business. However, there are times when quitting can actually benefit your operations.

Imagine you have a project consuming all your resources with no real returns. What should you do?

Adversity is pervasive throughout business. Every administrator, manager, and employee deals with some form of adversity during the course of business. Overcoming these problematic scenarios is key to keeping operations running efficiently and creating the environment to keep adversity at bay. Let’s look at some of the strategies it takes to rise up against the adversity you may (and probably will) encounter in business.

If you want your business to thrive, then you need to set goals that allow it to do so. Today, we want to explore a framework for goal setting that your business can benefit from: the SMART goal framework.

For modern businesses, staying as efficient as possible is mandatory for optimal productivity. By eliminating inefficiencies, small businesses can stay competitive. One effective strategy is to streamline processes through implementing tools that fuel automation.

When most people pick a job, they understand that the work they will be doing will often have them doing things that may occasionally make them feel frustrated. Most people don’t go to school for clerical work and mundane tasks and often don’t understand why it’s their responsibility to forgo their training to complete tasks that untrained people could do. This lack of understanding about running a secure and reliable business is a central sticking point for many organizations.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, business owners considered remote work a forbidden fruit. If employees got a taste, they would only want more of it. Nowadays, remote work is a bit more commonplace, no doubt as a result of the pandemic forcing most knowledge workers into some sort of remote work arrangement. How have companies adjusted to this new reality? Let’s look at the numbers.

With business technology, your company can reap countless benefits, but at the same time, failing to implement the right tools—or worse, implementing the wrong tools altogether—can have devastating consequences. Today, we want to help you understand how you can make the best, most educated decisions regarding your business technology needs while avoiding investments in technology that won’t pay dividends.

If you regularly use Google Docs, you may already be familiar with templates. They can be a quick and efficient way to create certain types of documents that you often use. With several prebuilt into Docs already, you might wonder if you can make your own, and it turns out you can!

Let’s discuss how you can use Google Docs templates and how to make your own. First, we’ll look at what types of elements you might need to implement for your templates, and then we’ll get into the details of how to do it!

The concept of dark mode has saturated the technological ecosystem and consciousness and is being incorporated by software and hardware vendors alike. Although embraced by vendors and users as a needed feature, the question remains, is there a benefit to dark mode?

Every business relies on some sort of productivity. Whether it’s sales, manufacturing, distributing, managing, or support. If you are looking for a way to get more from your staff, giving them direct access to all the data they need to do their job properly can go a long way toward putting them in a position to succeed.

When you decided to start your business, you had to be overwhelmed with everything that you had to do just to get it off the ground. If you are like many entrepreneurs, getting a product to market was the aim then, but as business continues and your organization grows, it’s likely that you’ve looked to technology as a benefit. So, when does the amount of technology you have become a hindrance to your bottom line? We will take a look at what happens when an organization takes their love of technology too far.

Streaming in the office is a topic of hot debate amongst business owners, and for good reason. Depending on the type of media being streamed, it can either enhance or hinder office productivity. What does your company need to know about streaming, and what you can do about employees who can’t resist the urge?

Since eCommerce has experienced a surge in popularity, your employees might be tempted to get their holiday shopping out of the way as soon as possible by doing a little bit of browsing during your hours of operation. Depending on your business’s policies regarding personal Internet usage during office hours, you may need to take action against those who abuse the privilege.

We’ve all become so adapted to the conveniences of the Internet that it’s difficult to remember what society was like before it. This becomes especially obvious when watching old movies. How odd is it to see characters do pre-Internet activities like go to the library to research information and use a phone book? These are just some of the ways that the Internet has dramatically changed society, for better and perhaps for worse.

Modern businesses are reliant on certain parts of their infrastructure to keep operations functioning. For example, if your building’s electricity were to go down, what would you do? What about if you lost Internet access? Would your business be able to keep your employees busy, or would the downtime experienced be enough to cause panic?

GIFs. What are they? If you’ve spent any time perusing the Internet, you’ve definitely come across a GIF or two. Essentially, a GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is an animated picture that loops a few seconds of a video clip (without playing any audio). In addition to GIFs being fun, they can serve as a great way to enhance digital communications. How can you take advantage of GIFs?